The only thing more indecipherable than the untidy scrawl in which the recipe for “Potingall Cakes” is written is the instructions themselves.

There’s the unconventional direction to “strew in yr sugar and flower,” the inclusion of two spoonfuls of something called “sack” and the weird final command to “set up the lead.” Not to mention the rather flexible relationship the recipe’s 18th-century author had with spelling: “flower” refers to “flour,” “pretty” is spelled with an “i.”

Not even the recipe’s title is quite what it seems. It’s a mangled version of a common British dessert, Portugal cakes, akin to madeleines studded with currants.

“I still have split seconds when I look at something and think, ‘Oh, it’s in Latin,’ ” says Alyssa Connell, who is reading and reinterpreting this 300-year-old recipe for her website.

Even so, the English-literature scholar needs only 15 minutes to translate and transcribe “Potingall Cakes” into a Microsoft Word document. Apparently, terms like “sack” become familiar when you specialize in the domestic culture of early modern Britain. (For the rest of us, it’s a fortified white wine similar to sherry, and it would have come from Portugal, which Connell suspects may explain the dessert’s name.)

Connell is a sixth-year PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and half of the team behind “Cooking in the Archives,” a site dedicated to digging up interesting recipes from Penn’s archive of handwritten manuscripts and rewriting them for modern cooks. Her partner, Marissa Nicosia, graduated in the spring and now teaches at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif. Both are specialists in literature from England’s early modern period, which extends from the 16th to 19th centuries.

Alyssa Connell, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, works with a partner to adapt old recipes for modern cooks. Photo: Will Figg/The Washington Post

Funded by a grant from Penn’s graduate program, their project is something of a cross between a cooking blog and a public access television history program. The posts are chatty and informative and fall on just the right side of utter nerdiness. (There are frequent references to the Oxford English Dictionary and at least one foray into Shakespeare.)

Connell and Nicosia select their recipes from a collection of more than 100 cookbooks held by Penn’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. Each of the texts was written between 1600 and 1800 and was digitized sometime in the last five years. For philosophical reasons, “Cooking in the Archives” features only handwritten recipes: “In academia, the default is print rather than manuscripts because it’s more accessible,” Connell says. “I like the underdogs of historical literary records. . . . It feels like rescue of some kind.”

Since the site launched in June, the duo has unearthed and modernized more than a dozen recipes, from the familiar (“maccarony cheese”) to the pleasantly peculiar (“my Lady Chanworth’s receipt for Jumballs”) to the unpleasantly bizarre (“fish custard”).

The two recipes Connell is making today, Carrot Pudding and Portugal Cakes, fall somewhere between the first two categories. Despite the former’s ominous-sounding name, it isn’t so different from a crustless pumpkin pie. Connell adds cinnamon and ginger to her version (“because we like them, and why not?” she says) and purees the ingredients with a food processor, rather than a mortar and pestle. Still, for a dessert made of ingredients nearly every modern cook has on hand — carrots, eggs, sugar, cream — the puddings that emerge from Connell’s oven taste satisfyingly antique.

The ingredients for the Portugal Cakes are a bit more obscure: currants, rose water. But it’s the process, not the components, that marks this recipe as decidedly 18th century. The author includes measurements — making her something of an anomaly among her contemporaries — but leaves out several instructions a modern baker might consider critical: what kind of pan to bake the cakes in, what temperature to set the oven. She also instructs cooks to work the butter and rose water in their hands “till it all be very soft,” a step Connell chooses to bypass.

“I started to do that and was like, ‘I have a Kitchen Aid mixer,’ ” she laughs. “Not so authentic, but oh, so helpful.”

Connell and Nicosia are trained in paleography — the study of historic handwriting — and adhere to strict academic standards during transcription. But they allow themselves more flexibility once they get into the kitchen. Usually they have no choice: The lack of 21st-century specificity makes re-creating these dishes more of an intuitive process. For the Portugal Cakes, Connell substitutes sherry for sack and ignores the “set up the lead” instruction entirely.

“At a certain point you have to just let go of precision and see what happens,” Connell says. “If it turns out to be edible, well, then you’ve done something right.”

Alyssa Connell and partner Marissa Nicosia re-create handwritten recipes from the University of Pennsylvania’s rare-books collection. Their recipe for Potingall Cakes comes from this book, which dates from the mid-18th century. Photo: Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania

There are schools of thought in the realm of antique cooking that frown on this blase attitude toward technique — and yes, the historic-recipe trend is big enough to contain schools of thought. But for Connell and Nicosia, the project is less about rigidly reproducing the foods of the 18th century than about bringing them into the 21st. The two are fans of reality cooking shows and baking blogs. They network with other food historians via Facebook and Twitter. And none of their work would be possible without Penn’s online archive of digitized manuscripts; they couldn’t exactly borrow the original texts from the library for home use.

“It’s actually striking to me how much this can only happen through technology,” Connell says. “The handwritten recipe books are the technology by which these were used and preserved, and now it’s Twitter and e-mail that’s maintaining them.”

Indeed, she sees the impulse to painstakingly reproduce centuries-old dishes as a trendy one, the home cook’s corollary to a chef’s garden of heirloom produce or a hipster’s vintage typewriter. “I think there’s a wave of interest in making things yourself — you know, cooking and pickling,” Connell says. “People are more interested now in knowing exactly where things come from.”

But reviving antique recipes is more than just some New Age experiment in authenticity. It’s real social science.

“These are historical documents as well as culinary documents. They’re a window onto a particular moment,” says Rebecca Laroche. She is a professor of English literature at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and a founding member of the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective, which seeks to aggregate the archives and food history research of various universities on one comprehensive website.

Laroche’s expertise is in antique remedies, not food, but she has still done her fair share of recipe re-creation (including carefully de-petaling several pounds of flowers for “sirrop of violets,” a supposedly calming tonic used by early-modern herbalists).

“There’s value in actually getting your hands dirty,” Laroche says, “You can learn a lot about what’s at stake, why things were done, what it meant to be in that time.”

For Connell, whose doctoral research is on the travel writing of 18th-century Britain, bringing the transcribed recipes into her kitchen has made her more conscious of the way the world worked 300 years ago. For example, the presence of certain ingredients — spices, exotic citrus — illustrates the extent of trade networks at the time, while the absence of others — baking soda and other modern leavening agents — shows how far science still had to go.

There’s a feminist angle to the project as well. Printed literary works — the kind that are widely available and studied today — were mostly the province of men in the early modern period. For those like Connell and Laroche with an interest in analyzing women’s records, handwritten documents on food and medicine are often the only surviving resource.

Connell carries an awareness of those concerns in her transcribing and her baking. Rather than get wrapped up in trying to figure out who wrote the recipe she’s reading, it’s enough for her to know the academic value of the work.

But while eating the results of her labours, she lets herself indulge in a little romance:

“I love the thought that someone 300 years ago might have been reading a text I’ve read many times before while munching on Portugal cakes,” she says.

After all, the recipe is centuries old, but the pleasure of eating is timeless.

RECIPES

Potingall Cakes (Portugal Cakes)

Potingall Cakes, or Portugal Cakes.

Makes 18 small cakes

This recipe offers insight into the tastes of 18th-century British society — its love of rose water, its lack of chocolate — and into the period’s disregard for conventional spelling (a mangled version of “Portugal cakes,” a common dessert at the time). The resulting “cakes” are akin to a firm madeleine and go well with coffee or tea.

In the spirit of updating the recipe for the modern kitchen, the batter is beaten with an electric mixer. You’ll need a madeleine pan; or see the VARIATION, below, about pans and yields.

MAKE AHEAD: The cakes can be stored in an airtight container for up to 2 days.

Adapted by Alyssa Connell of the University of Pennsylvania’s Cooking in the Archives project, from a 1730 cookbook cataloged as Ms. Codex 631 in the university’s rare-books collection.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease the madeleine pan(s) with a little butter.

Whisk together the flour, sugar and salt in a bowl.

Combine the 16 tablespoons of butter and the rose water in the bowl of a stand mixer or handheld electric mixer; beat on low, then medium speed until lightened and fluffy. Stop to scrape down the bowl.

On low speed, add the eggs and egg yolk one at a time and the sherry; stop to scrape down the bowl. Add half of the flour mixture, beating on low speed, then add the remaining flour mixture and the currants. Spoon the batter into the pan(s), filling to the top. Bake 1 pan at a time for 14 to 16 minutes, until firm and golden brown. Let cool in the pan for 3 to 5 minutes, then transfer the cakes to a wire rack to cool completely before serving or storing. Repeat to use all the batter.

VARIATION: The batter will make 24 mini cakes in a mini muffin pan, with enough left over to make 8 cupcakes (in a standard-size muffin pan). Fill the mini muffin wells nearly full; fill the muffin pan wells 1/2 to 3/4 full. Mini cakes and cupcake-size cakes will not rise much.

This version of the early American pudding makes half of what the original recipe yielded; ground ginger and cinnamon have been added. A firm apple such as Granny Smith produces a slightly chunkier pudding than an apple that breaks down during baking, such as a Macintosh.

Adapted by Alyssa Connell of the University of Pennsylvania’s Cooking in the Archives project, from a 1730 cookbook cataloged as Ms. Codex 631 in the university’s rare-books collection.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Have at hand a deep 9-inch pie plate or six 6-ounce ramekins.

Bring a medium pot of water to a boil over medium-high heat. Trim the carrots, then cut them into 1-inch segments. Transfer to the pot of water; boil them for about 8 minutes, until still firm but tender enough to be pierced with a knife.

Meanwhile, peel, core and quarter the apples; cut each quarter into 2 to 4 pieces, depending on the size of the apple. Add the apples to the pot; boil them for the last 3 minutes that the carrots are cooking. Drain and let cool for 5 to 10 minutes.

Transfer the carrots and apples to a food processor, along with the sugar, cinnamon, ginger, zests and juice; puree until well incorporated.

Add the cream (to taste) and eggs, and puree until smooth. (The version using softer apples and more cream will resemble sweet potato pie filling; the version with firmer apples and less cream will be gloppier, even slightly lumpy. Both taste great.)

Pour the mixture into the pie plate, or divide it evenly among the ramekins. Bake for 30 (ramekins) to 55 minutes (pie plate). The pudding is done when set: It might jiggle slightly, but the center shouldn’t look more liquid than the edges. The edges will have pulled away from the sides a bit.

]]>http://o.canada.com/life/food/piping-hot-from-a-300-year-old-kitchen/feed0Potingall Cakes, or Portugal Cakes. This recipe offers insight into the tastes of 18th-century British society — its love of rose water, its lack of chocolate — and into the period's disregard for conventional spelling (a mangled version of "Portugal cakes," a common dessert at the time). The resulting "cakes" are akin to a firm madeleine and go well with coffee or tea.washingtonpostcanadacomAlyssa Connell, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, works with a partner to adapt old recipes for modern cooks.Alyssa Connell and partner Marissa Nicosia re-create handwritten recipes from the University of Pennsylvania’s rare-books collection. Their recipe for Potingall Cakes comes from this book, which dates from the mid-18th century. Photo: Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of PennsylvaniaPotingall Cakes, or Portugal Cakes.Carrot Pudding, a version of an early American pudding.First-of-a-kind Novartis heart failure drug saves lives, cuts hospitalizations in big studyhttp://o.canada.com/news/first-of-a-kind-novartis-heart-failure-drug-saves-lives-cuts-hospitalizations-in-big-study
http://o.canada.com/news/first-of-a-kind-novartis-heart-failure-drug-saves-lives-cuts-hospitalizations-in-big-study#commentsSun, 31 Aug 2014 00:16:40 +0000http://postmediacanadadotcom.wordpress.com/?p=506903]]>By Marilynn Marchione

A new study reports one of the biggest potential advances against heart failure in more than a decade — a first-of-a-kind, experimental drug that lowered the chances of death or hospitalization by about 20 per cent.

Doctors say the Novartis drug — which doesn’t have a name yet — seems like one of those rare, breakthrough therapies that could quickly change care for more than half of the 6 million Americans and 24 million people worldwide with heart failure.

“This is a new day” for patients, said Dr. Clyde Yancy, cardiology chief at Northwestern University in Chicago and a former American Heart Association president

“It’s been at least a decade since we’ve had a breakthrough of this magnitude,” said Yancy, who had no role in the study.

It involved nearly 8,500 people in 47 countries and was the largest experiment ever done in heart failure. It was paid for, designed and partly run by Novartis, based in Basel, Switzerland. Independent monitors stopped the study in April, seven months earlier than planned, when it was clear the drug was better than an older one that is standard now.

During the 27-month study, the Novartis drug cut the chances of dying of heart-related causes by 20 per cent and for any reason by 16 per cent, compared to the older drug. It also reduced the risk of being hospitalized for heart failure by 21 per cent.

in this file photo, the logo of Novartis pictured on a building of Novartis’ headquarters. SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP/Getty Images

Results were disclosed Saturday at a European Society of Cardiology conference in Barcelona and published online by the New England Journal of Medicine.

Novartis will seek approval for the drug — for now called LCZ696 — by the end of this year in the United States and early next year in Europe

Heart failure is the top reason older people are hospitalized, and a leading cause of death. It develops when the heart muscle weakens over time and can no longer pump effectively, often because of damage from a heart attack. Fluid can back up into the lungs and leave people gasping for breath.

The people in this study were already taking three to five medicines to control the condition. One medicine often used is an ACE inhibitor, and the study tested one of these — enalapril, sold as Vasotec and in generic form — against the Novartis drug.

The new drug is a twice-a-day pill combination of two medicines that block the effects of substances that harm the heart while also preserving ones that help protect it. One of the medicines also dilates blood vessels and allows the heart to pump more effectively.

In the study, 26.5 per cent on the older drug, enalapril, died of heart-related causes or were hospitalized for heart failure versus less than 22 per cent of those on the Novartis drug. Quality of life also was better with the experimental drug.

“We now have a way of stabilizing and managing their disease which is better than what we could offer them before,” Packer said.

The new drug also seemed safe — reassuring because safety concerns doomed a couple of other promising-looking treatments over the last decade. There were more cases of too-low blood pressure and non-serious swelling beneath the skin with the Novartis drug, but more kidney problems, excess potassium in the blood and coughing with the older drug. More people on the older treatment dropped out of the study than those on the new one.

About 32 people would need to be treated with the new drug to prevent one death from heart-related causes.

“That’s a favourable number,” said Dr. Joseph G. Rogers, a Duke University cardiologist with no role in the study. He said the benefits were big enough that “I would switch people over” as soon as the drug is available.

The drug “may well represent a new threshold of hope” for patients, Dr. Mariell Jessup, heart failure chief at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a commentary in the journal. It may help “a wide spectrum of patients, even those who are currently receiving the best possible therapy.”

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/first-of-a-kind-novartis-heart-failure-drug-saves-lives-cuts-hospitalizations-in-big-study/feed0WebPix 20140422theassociatedpresscanada in this file photo, the logo of Novartis pictured on a building of Novartis' headquarters. SEBASTIEN BOZON/AFP/Getty ImagesAntidepressant may cut protein involved in Alzheimer’s development: studyhttp://o.canada.com/news/antidepressant-may-cut-protein-involved-in-alzheimers-development-study
http://o.canada.com/news/antidepressant-may-cut-protein-involved-in-alzheimers-development-study#commentsWed, 14 May 2014 20:18:49 +0000http://postmediacanadadotcom.wordpress.com/?p=445966]]>THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON — Research shows a common antidepressant may cut production of one of the chief suspects behind Alzheimer’s, a new avenue in the hunt for drugs to prevent the devastating brain disease.

It’s far too early for anyone worried about dementia to try the drug citalopram, which sells as the brand Celexa — and comes with side effects.

Alzheimer’s is characterized by sticky plaques that form in patients’ brains 10 to 15 years before the first memory symptoms are noticed. Scientists have tried treatments to clear away those plaques, made of a protein named beta-amyloid that somehow goes awry and starts clumping together, but with no success yet.

Wednesday’s study is a somewhat different approach, beginning to explore if it’s possible to slow the plaque from building up by altering the body’s production of amyloid.

First, researchers gave citalopram to older mice with Alzheimer’s-like brain damage. The animals’ existing plaques didn’t go away but they quit growing — and dramatically fewer new plaques formed compared to mice given sugar water, the research team reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Next, researchers gave a single dose of citalopram or a placebo to 23 healthy young adults, people who neither were depressed nor old enough to have brain plaques. Tests of the volunteers’ spinal fluid over the next day and a half showed their normal amyloid production dropped by 37 per cent, the researchers reported.

It will take years of additional research to tell if that translates into any protective effect. Citalopram and similar drugs called SSRIs alleviate depression by affecting levels of the brain chemical serotonin; Sheline said citalopram probably alters amyloid production in a completely different way.

Photo: sudok1/Fotolia.comTomography image.

In fact, the next question is whether it’s even possible to tamp amyloid production down for long periods or if the body would just get used to the drug and adjust. Sheline has begun enrolling healthy older adults into a study to see if using citalopram for two weeks has the same effect.

More than 5 million Americans already have Alzheimer’s or related dementia, numbers expected to jump to 16 million by 2050 as the population ages. There is no cure, and today’s medications only temporarily ease symptoms.

Scientists still don’t know exactly what causes Alzheimer’s. The leading theory is that those amyloid plaques somehow start the disease process but that it takes another abnormal protein, named tau, to push someone over the edge.

It’s crucial to investigate ways to intervene in the years before symptoms arise, said Heather Snyder of the Alzheimer’s Association, who wasn’t involved in the new research.

Whether antidepressants pan out or not, the researchers are using an intriguing method of analyzing spinal fluid “that gives us new information that will open the door to further discoveries around Alzheimer’s disease,” she said.

Citalopram has been used to treat depression for nearly two decades, but it does have side effects and the Food and Drug Administration has warned that higher doses may trigger dangerous irregular heartbeats. Still, separate research published earlier this year suggested citalopram also might calm the agitation that people with advanced Alzheimer’s can suffer.

They’re also much less likely to smoke and drink alcohol, a paradoxical finding since those habits can contribute to many conditions that disproportionately affect autistic adults. Scientists say that could mean that their biologic makeup contributes to some of the illnesses.

The study is one of the largest, most comprehensive efforts to examine the health of autistic adults and highlights a need for better strategies to treat them, said scientist Lisa Croen, the lead author and director of the autism research program at Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, California.

Some of the same health disparities also have been found in autistic children, but there’s little research on whether they persist into adulthood or if new ailments develop.

“This new study makes a vitally important contribution by helping to map this little-explored territory,” said Paul Shattuck, a Drexel University autism researcher who was not involved.

The study was prepared for release Wednesday at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Atlanta. It’s based on medical records for 2,100 adults with autism spectrum disorder, an umbrella term encompassing mild autism and the more classic form of the disorder. They were enrolled during 2008-12 in a Kaiser health plan in northern California. Their records were compared with 21,000 non-autistic Kaiser enrollees.

Key results for autistic versus non-autistic adults:

Depression: 38 per cent vs. 17 per cent.

Suicide attempts: 1.6 per cent vs. .3 per cent.

High blood pressure: 27 per cent vs. 19 per cent

Cholesterol problems: 26 per cent vs. 18 per cent.

Obesity: 27 per cent vs. 16 per cent.

Alcohol use: 23 per cent vs. 53 per cent

Smoking: 16 per cent vs. 30 per cent.

Autism expert David Mandell, director of a mental health policy centre at the University of Pennsylvania, said research is needed to determine if autistic adults are more likely to be diagnosed with other conditions simply because they have more contact with doctors. But Mandell said the disparities are probably real and that the medical community tends to focus mostly on treating behavioural problems in autism. The study highlights a need to focus equally on “these very important health conditions,” many of which are preventable, he said.

The government’s latest statistics suggest that 1 in 68 U.S. children have autism, or more than 1 million Americans. It’s considered a lifelong disorder that can involve language, intellectual and social impairments and unusual, repetitious behaviours.

Some common features, including lack of eye contact and social awkwardness, might suggest that people with autism dislike human contact. But Croen said it’s more likely that they share a desire to connect with other people but have trouble doing so. That isolation could lead to problems like depression, she said.

Croen said isolation might also at least partly explain the lower rates of drinking and smoking, since those are social activities.

Even when it’s logical to cut our losses, social science consistently shows that people are reluctant to walk away – typically on account of time, effort or money already invested. To wit, when was the last time you left the theatre partway through a horrible movie?

The good news is that a new academic study has uncovered a surprisingly practical way of resisting this “sunk-cost bias”: mindfulness.

Reporting in the journal Psychological Science, researchers find that meditation, even for as brief as 15 minutes, can profoundly increase our odds of abandoning a losing proposition. In one experiment, for example, more than three-quarters of people who performed a mindfulness exercise resisted the sunk-cost bias, compared to fewer than half of those whose minds were allowed to wander.

“Meditation reduced how much people focused on the past and future, and this led to less negative emotion. The reduced negative emotion then facilitated letting go of sunk costs,” said global business school INSEAD researcher Andrew Hafenbrack, who co-authored the study with Zoe Kinias, an INSEAD professor of organizational behaviour, and Sigal Barsade, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

The study draws on four experiments with more than 500 participants and a variety of scenarios.

In one set-up, for instance, people were asked to imagine that their aviation business has committed $10 million to developing a plane that couldn’t be detected by radar. After $9 million had been spent, however, a rival company introduced a similar plane with better performance and a lower cost.

Participants who performed mindful meditation (ie: focused breathing exercise) prior to making their choice resisted “throwing good money after bad” at a much higher rate than those who did no such exercise: 53 per cent versus 29 per cent.

A similar experiment asked people to imagine that shortly after investing in a $200,000 printing press, a bankrupt competitor offered to sell them a similar one — which worked 50 per cent faster at half the production cost — for just $10,000. Seventy-eight per cent of participants in the mindfulness condition decided to buy the latter machine, versus 44 per cent of those in a control condition.

Hafenbrack said the study helps validate the decision of such companies as Google to implement on-site mindfulness programs for employees, and lends credence to the practice of meditation by many respected CEOs. But there are also implications for consumers — and particularly those faced with fulfilling New Year’s resolutions, such as not over-eating.

“When the amount that people eat is influenced by portion or container size because they don’t want to feel wasteful, our study suggests that mindfulness meditation may help,” said Hafenbrack, an organizational behaviour researcher. “Over time, this could also translate to buying less and wasting less food.”

Q & A with Andrew Hafenbrack

Postmedia: Why are we so hesitant to cut our losses?

AH: Sometimes ‘cutting our losses’ means admitting that an original decision to start an investment in the first place was a mistake, and people can be reluctant to admit they made that mistake and that they were wrong. Similarly, people often strongly dislike losing or wasting money, so they will often take on more risk in order to get their initial investment back, so they have a chance to at least ‘break even.’ Admittedly, in reality, it can be difficult to perceive whether a person is being admirably resilient in the face of setbacks or committing the sunk-cost bias, and expectations that leaders ‘stay the course’ may at times contribute to this problem.

Andrew Hafenbrack, INSEAD

Postmedia: Can you provide some examples of the sunk-cost bias?

AH: Entrepreneurs continue throwing money into losing ventures even when the odds of success are increasingly slim. Investors hold onto losing stocks too long. Governments often continue fighting wars they know they probably cannot win. People also stay in bad relationships too long, follow bad advice because they paid for it, and continue to eat large desserts despite being full.

Postmedia: What is mindfulness meditation?

AH: Mindfulness meditation is a practice of cultivating present-moment awareness, often accomplished by focusing attention on the physical sensations of breathing. We also found that that the more people focus on the present in general, the less likely they are to fall victim to the sunk cost bias.

Postmedia: How might businesses apply this?

AH: Creating a culture where people can make thoughtful and effective decisions may be facilitated by creating a mindfulness room where people can briefly meditate, or providing instructions or recorded materials for employees to briefly meditate at their desk, especially when feeling overly stressed or unhappy.

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/national/mindfulness-study/feed0GROWN UPS 2mistyharrisAndrew Hafenbrack, INSEADOne easy secret to making people like and trust you morehttp://o.canada.com/news/national/apologies
http://o.canada.com/news/national/apologies#commentsTue, 01 Oct 2013 15:54:06 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=320819]]>Harvard researchers have uncovered one easy way to increase likability, appear more benevolent, and be perceived as trustworthy. Better still, Canadians practically have the behaviour in their DNA.

Across four experiments with 730 people, superfluous apologies — that is, saying sorry for things for which you’re ultimately blameless — were proven to improve strangers’ opinions of the people expressing regret. The unwarranted contrition was interpreted by recipients as a sign of empathy, boosting the apologizer’s likability, perceived compassion and trustworthiness.

In other words, all those times you’ve uttered a mea culpa for bad weather, nasty traffic or even the poor performance of a favourite sports team, you’ve been doing your credibility a favour.

“People are often afraid to apologize for fear of looking weak,” said study author Alison Wood Brooks, an assistant professor in Harvard Business School’s Negotiation, Organizations and Markets Unit.

“What we find in this paper is that it doesn’t harm perceptions of power. Instead, apologizing for things that aren’t your fault can show empathic concern, which leads people to trust you more.”

A young man asks to borrow a stranger’s cellphone, as part of a recent study on apologies

In one lab experiment, for instance, participants were more likely to entrust money to someone who’d issued a superfluous apology than someone who had not. And in a field experiment, people were significantly more likely to lend their cellphone to a stranger when he first apologized for the rainy weather: 47 per cent, versus nine per cent of those who did not receive any expression of superfluous regret.

“When I say, ‘I’m so sorry you got stuck in traffic,’ it shows that I’m taking your perspective, I’m acknowledging that something unfortunate happened to you, and I’m expressing concern, which leads you to trust me more,” said Brooks, noting that this is the first study of its kind.

“All previous apology literature has assumed that there has to be some sort of wrongdoing — some violation or transgression in order for someone to apologize.”

Researchers also compared traditional apologies to superfluous ones and, surprisingly, found the latter to be more compelling.

“There has been no transgression, no loss of trust. You’re starting from zero and only adding trust, as opposed to being in a negative domain of trust and trying to get back to zero,” explained Brooks.

The study dovetails with recent work out of The Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, where scholars have found that when fault is ambiguous, it’s in a person’s best strategic interest to assume blame.

Though Brooks acknowledges there may be a limit to these positive effects, her research so far reveals no immediate negative consequences to the behaviour.

“People tend to make the error of not apologizing enough; what we find is that it seems like you can’t apologize too much,” said Brooks. “You seem more likable, you seem more benevolent, and people trust you more.”

The study was co-authored by Hengchen Dai and Maurice E. Schweitzer, both of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and will be published in a future issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

]]>http://o.canada.com/news/national/apologies/feed0NHLmistyharrisA young man asks to borrow a stranger's cellphone, as part of a recent study on apologiesPBS’s Rise of the Drones charts robots among ushttp://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/pbss-rise-of-the-drones-charts-robots-among-us
http://o.canada.com/entertainment/television/pbss-rise-of-the-drones-charts-robots-among-us#commentsSun, 20 Jan 2013 19:54:30 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=185260]]>

The ever-shifting lines between ground-breaking technology and morality and ethics are being drawn into sharp focus once again, both in the shadowy world of cyberspace and in the more mundane day-to-day details of everyday living, as this week’s Nova program Rise of the Drones illustrates.

Drones are in the news every day, through their military application in Afghanistan and Pakistan and, more recently, in Mali and Algeria in North Africa.

What many people may not realize, according to a panel of insiders — military advisors, academics and the engineer dubbed the “Father of the Predator” — who faced the media at last week’s meeting of the TV Critics Association in Los Angeles, is that drones are being used increasingly in civilian life, by big-city police departments looking to cut costs on aerial surveillance and by traffic monitors, among others.

Drones, unmanned aerial robots that replace hands-on pilots and navigators, are a marvel of technology.

There are those, though — including Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative in Washington, D.C. — who caution that drones’ widespread application hasn’t been properly thought out, from either a legal, ethical or even scientific point of view.

Drones are making science fiction a reality, Nova producer Peter Yost says, which is one reason why he was so anxious to make the program.

The worry, according to Singer, is that we may soon have 30,000 drones crisscrossing the sky, gathering information on every breath you take, every move you make.

Singer appeared on a panel alongside Yost, University of Pennsylvania engineering professor Vijay Kumar, predator drone creator Abraham Karem, founder of Karem Aircraft, and retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, president and CEO of the Deptula Group and an ardent advocate of the use of drones as a way of minimizing casualties — both civilian and military — in conflict zones.

Semantics aside, one thing is certain: Drones are opening a new chapter in aviation history, and Yost wants anyone who sees the program to be more aware of what’s going on from a scientific perspective, and what may be at stake from a human, social perspective.

That shadowy relationship between the multi-billion dollar video-game industry, with its institutional paranoia over industrial espionage, and the real-world U.S. military, which values secrecy and security above everything else, made Rise of the Drones a difficult program to make, Yost admitted.

“It’s a shadow world,” Yost said. “I spent a year, reading and just talking to people as a straight reporter, and I would often hit walls. I had to make aesthetic choices that reflect the sense that while we’re seeing some of this, we’re not seeing other pieces of this. That’s just the reality. I know that everyone in the program knows things they’re not telling us, or things we just can’t know.

“We’re putting some light on this. That’s what the program is about. There are certain things we know, that we learned along the way — but there’s a lot we don’t.”

Kumar, professor of robotics engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, agreed the questions of privacy and surveillance are important.

“But I’ll tell you now that we are our own worst enemies in that regard,” he said. “Every one of us carrying cellphones, we take pictures and oftentimes these end up on the Internet. And it’s unclear to me that what we’re doing will actually significantly affect the level of privacy we have as individuals.

“You have to look at the positive side (of drones), too. Imagine the aftermath of a disaster and the need to respond to that immediately The first responders some day will no longer be humans. They’ll be robots. They’ll respond. They’ll be the eyes and ears on the scene providing situational awareness, so when humans come, they’re not in harm’s way.”

Singer for his part cautions against a brave new world where Big Brother is all-seeing, however.

“This technology, it’s a lot like the computer around 1980,” he said.

“It’s a powerful technology. It’s moving from the military side over into the civilian world, and we’re going to see both incredible positive uses for it, but also some negative uses. I do think it is a game‑changer when you start to think about issues of privacy.

“For example, when it comes to law enforcement — and, again, this is not far off in the future — you’ve got literally tens of thousands of local police departments that, right now, either can’t afford aerial surveillance or they can only afford one or two police helicopters, they’re going to turn to these small drones. They’ll be able to get them in large numbers. That does change the kind of tracking that the police will be able to do. I think of the old Where’s Waldo? books.

“Even if you’re only trying to find Waldo, you’re going to pick up footage of a lot of other people. I don’t mean this in a nefarious 1984 way. It just means that a lot more people are going to be brought under observation.

“As for the positive uses, I think of the realm of journalism. We’re seeing a lot of different journalist programs start to look into using surveillance. That’s going to mean a lot better reporting.

“But we’re also seeing things like paparazzi exploring using it. The head of one paparazzi agency said it will, quote, ‘Strike fear into the heart of any celebrity thinking about having an outdoor birthday party.’ That’s the world we’re going into.”

Vijay Kumar, along with GRASP Lab members Daniel Melligner and Alex Kushleyev, are helping scientists and engineers create smarter, faster, and more flexible robots by mimicking the swarming behaviors of birds, fish and insects.

Figuring out how to move in unison without crashing into obstacles, or one another, is a critical skill for robot teams to develop, especially since they may one day be used to survey landscapes, build structures, or even play music.

This is exactly how we like to see robots spend their time. Now all we need is to get our hands on a real Golden Snitch.

Trike drifting

This video is about as badass as a group of grown men can look while riding trikes. Watch as they glide across the center line, veering in and out of traffic, on and off the road.

Set to Can’t Stop Won’t Stop’s Toys for Boys, the video makes trike drifting look irresistible. The video has collected over a million views since it was uploaded to Youtube on February 28, which likely means dozens of copycat videos are currently being filmed.

We expect to see hysterical broadcast TV reports on the dangers of trike drifting by next week, putting it alongside whip-its and coach surfing on the parental frenzy list.

This week we stumbled upon this spoof when it was posted on Wimp. Click through for waves of cuteness and nostalgia for a meme left to the pop culture tomb.

Blindfolded guy solves Rubik’s Cube

Rubik’s Cube obsessives meet constantly at competitions trying to one up the rest in speed. But Marcell Endrey took the battle to a whole new level this week, smashing the world record for solving a Rubik’s Cube while wearing a blindfold.

One would think this feat would take several minutes at best, but a record, caught on video, shows Marcell Endrey of Hungary solving the cube in an astonishing 28.80 seconds. Keep an eye out for the kid sitting behind Endrey, who flashes a priceless reaction.

In the saddest ever addition to the animal spot, this week Cain Solutions released a video of a little girl killing a goldfish. The 30-second ad features an eerily unsaturated image of a girl who drains the water from a fishbowl, leaving the fish flopping on the ground.

Then she tosses a bit more water on it and leaves it for dead.

Someone needs to let Herman Cain and his group know the web is for happy animal videos. They can also tell him the fight against Obama is fruitless.